"Most people will come in at one of the higher fee amounts," Arsen Kashkashian, the store's head buyer and the architect of the program, told me. "That surprised us." In fact, when the store first began charging its consignment authors back in 2007 (the fee-structure idea emerged when the store's employees found themselves "inundated with self-published books, and there was a lot of work involved and not much reward"), its staff "thought people would grumble and complain" about the charges.